Question

I am trying to sort a list of names followed by another string such as:

John Doe
AVAIL

Sara Doe
CALL

Jim Doe
AVAIL

I am trying to sort these by name but can’t seem to figure it out with sort. Can someone provide some guidance?

My final output would look like this:

Jim Doe
AVAIL

John Doe
AVAIL

Sara Doe
CALL

Much appreciated!

Answer 1

Probably far from optimal, but

sed -r ':r;/(^|\n)$/!{$!{N;br}};s/\n/\v/g' names | sort | sed 's/\v/\n/g'

seems to do the job (names is the file with records). This allows records of arbitrary length, not just 2 lines.